One borough, one community

It seems quite obvious to me that the "one community" element of this Barking & Dagenham Council epithet for the borough is put there specifically to address the enduring idea that B&D is divided into two parts. In 1965 two former municipal boroughs did merge to form one London Borough (with other minor changes) and in 1980, those who believed that this merger should be reflected in the LB name won out, and The London Borough of Barking became The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.

It is one LB - no question, despite what a few people seem to believe (still), but the two parts idea still persists.

I have just seen the draft report of some research I worked on and it is interesting to see the issue touched on by writers who are certainly too young to have any recollection of 1965 and probably too young to have any recollection of 1980. Even so, they are not 'from round here' and would not / could not be expected to grasp the thrust and nuances of this fault line.

On the other hand, I might fairly be regarded as having an obsession with it. I have tried to unpack it, and slice and dice it to see what it's about and make it go away. My fellow researchers on the project apply the division in the two familiar ways. On is old enough to remember the merger and senses the fairly common belief that the Barking part of the borough gets the upper hand, to the detriment of the Dagenham part. Another falls into the trap set by the binomial and just offers the choice Barking, or Dagenham to research subjects, as if the subdivision of the borough were that simple.

We can't really be clear what people mean when they say 'Dagenham' those who hold with the older two parts idea "know" that Dagenham includes not only the former Dagenham borough, but also the parts of LB Redbridge and LB Havering that were added to B&D's territory in 1994.

But people in Marks Gate and Chadwell Heath (mainly in the former borough of Dagenham) report feeling left out - neither in Barking, nor in Dagenham.

There is no formal, documented geography that can divide B&D into two parts named Dagenham and Barking, but people speak as if there is and seem to assume that everyone is working to this definition. The nearest I could come to a working definition is that everywhere i the Borough that is not postal Barking (IG11) is in the Dagenham part of the borough. This definition is clear but otherwise absurd.

But whatever its history or geography and whatever rivalries pervade, it is quite clear that the whole borough cannot be - in any realistic sense or common understanding of the word 'community' - one community. Really the point is it is not two communities. It night be any number of communities between 3 and 17 if you want to use formal definitions, but based on a 'folksonomy' gathered by the council, the number is greater than that.

The problem with a folksonomy is that it has no clarity - people might use different names for their area even if they live in the same street. Conversely, trying to exactly divide the borough up into a useful number of stable areas (that do not overlap borough boundaries) would lead to endless arguments about where boundaries are and what the names of the areas should be. The latter could be removed from the chaos by randomly assigning a code to each area - then only the boundary would become an issue. But so far I haven't sourced a clear and useful map showing any, which makes for yet another challenge.

Should you still be following this, check out the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_districts_in_the_London_Borough_of_Barking_and_Dagenham where I have tried to unravel sub borough geography a little. Maybe it's a way forward?